Why put distancing scare quotes around the word “assault” in a paraphrase of what pro-human-rights organizations say about China unless reporter Alisha Sarkar herself doubts that China under Dictator Xi Jinping has been savagely assaulting people and their rights (The Independent, November 9, 2023)?
Fifty-nine organisations have appealed to US president Joe Biden to raise concerns regarding China’s “assault” on human rights during his meeting with Xi Jinping [to be held in San Francisco]….
Prior to the talks, a group of 59 human rights organisations wrote to Mr Biden, urging him to “prioritise concerns about Beijing’s lack of concrete human rights improvements” during the meeting….
The Xi Jinping administration has routinely denied the allegations of genocide made by the US and other Western nations as “the lie of the century”.
“Xi Jinping and his government are assaulting human rights on a scale unprecedented in decades,” the rights defenders said in the letter.
“President Biden, you have a unique opportunity to send strong messages to Xi Jinping about your position on human rights, which will likely have an impact in halting—and possibly reversing—this crisis.”…
Beijing has been accused of committing “crimes against humanity” against the Uyghurs and other ethnic minority groups over the past decade through alleged widespread abuses, including mass incarceration, forced labour, torture and sexual assault.
It’s not just an accusation. China’s large-scale crimes against humanity, or rather against individual people, are happening. A reporter can review the abundant testimony of actual victims: Uyghurs, Tibetans, members of Falun Gong, and others. As well as leaked internal documents showing how Chinese authorities have gone about about imprisoning and torturing Uyghurs and explaining things to distraught family members not yet abducted and incarcerated themselves.
If President Biden brings these matters up in San Francisco, he should come equipped with sheafs of documentation that he or a more capable aide can deploy if and when Xi objects that the claims about China’s assaults on human rights are the “lie of the century.”
The chances are small that even sustained public pressure from a U.S. president would lead Xi and his regime to begin to stop all the imprisonment, torture, rape, organ harvesting, and murders of millions of innocent people—at least not immediately or apart from a sustained worldwide campaign to publicize the atrocities, demand an end to them, and demand that others stop cooperating with and sanctioning the government that perpetrates them. But better to try and fail, for now, than to be silent.
Meanwhile, Republican congressmen have sent Biden their own proposed agenda for Biden’s meeting with Xi.
The demands include Beijing removing exit bans on U.S. citizens in China, increasing oversight on shipments of fentanyl precursors, and ceasing provocative Chinese maneuvers around U.S. ships and planes, as well as those of allies in the region.
The lawmakers also demanded the president push China to drop punitive measures against Chinese pro-democracy and human rights activists.
The list of all the things China should stop doing is long.
